Hello all! Unfortunately, this letter is going to be a little bit shorter than I'd have preferred — I've been having some computer issues and am writing on my phone. However, that's not a big deal for current purposes, because today's letter mostly exists to serve as an announcement: I will be beginning a New Series next week!
One of my favorite video games of all time is Squaresoft's wild 1998 masterpiece Xenogears. There are a lot of reasons for this, all of which I will go on to explore in the coming weeks; suffice it to say I regard Xenogears as a watershed moment for video game narrative, opening lines of possibility that still haven't been exhausted. It's an intricate, flawed, ambitious, deeply moving experience — and this experience is entirely and specifically bound up in the fact that it's a video game, with combat encounters and towns and an overworld; with exploration and cutscenes and minigames and grandiose theme songs. This intersection is one of the things that really interests me about games in general, and I think there's a lot to learn from Xenogears in particular.
I'm going to try to organize this as a kind of "let's play"-style series of posts, providing something like the experience of playing the game both for those who might want to play along/revisit it, and for those who haven't played it or don't want to — along with background information and meditations on what it's up to. A lot has been written about Xenogears, and I am far from an expert on the history or cultural context from which it emerged, though part of this project is to attempt to digest and synthesize some of that work into something more accessible then the scattered blogs and fan-translated ephemera out there right now. (I'll make sure to provide links for the curious!) Mostly I am personally interested in understanding how and why it works as an aesthetic object.
My original plan was to make this series part of the paid content (again, as always, if you can't afford it, toss me an email!!), but I'm not entirely sure. The first post in the series will be some general background/why you might be interested if you're not already; expect that next week at the latest.
Apologies again for the technical difficulties — much more to come soon………
<3